The thing about mirrors is that while they’re there, you can look away. You can cover them up. You can move them to another wall. But the longer you choose to ignore them, the more space they start to take up. Quietly, almost invisibly, they grow. Until one day, they don’t just crack. They don’t just break. They shatter.
And while you’re still standing there in shock, staring at the glittering dust on the floor
that’s when the monsters come.
We go through life walking around mirrors. Some are gentle. They show us things we’ve forgotten, or things we’ve overlooked. Sometimes they reflect something we’re doing wrong, but still have time to repair. These mirrors catch the light just enough to get our attention to nudge us into noticing, reflecting. They say, “This is uncomfortable, but you need to check on it.” That’s the grounded kind of self-awareness we can build from.
But when we ignore those mirrors long enough when we refuse to look, time after time, what once could’ve been a small reflection becomes something much harder to face. And when the glass finally gives way, what’s waiting on the other side isn’t clarity. It’s consequence.
Monsters, on the other hand… are not kind. Not pretty. Not patient.
They scream. They shake you. They stand in front of you, unmovable, unignorable.
They are terrifying and what they bring isn’t just fear, it’s soul-wrecking.
But you still want to listen to them.
Because when monsters come, they come to find you in the deepest dark
so you can finally find your way out.
Some of us, if we’re lucky, have faced a few of those monsters and survived.
I’ll tell you about mine.
1. The monster of losing someone who never was never truly in.
This one can be familiar to many.. The one that made me fight so hard to hold onto something I was never actually holding. It convinced me that if I just loved better, softer, more patiently, he would finally stay for real.
But deep down, I knew: he was never really all in. And still, I was terrified to lose him.
2. The monster of shrinking myself to keep the peace.
The part of me that got smaller every time he pulled away. The one that said, “Don’t bring this up, it’ll just push him further.” It cost me pieces of myself I didn’t even know I was giving away, until I was almost gone.
3. The monster of anxiousness reactivated.
I had done so much work, I knew how to breathe through panic, how to self-regulate, how to ground. But the chaos in him reawakened the chaos in me. Suddenly, I was back in survival mode. Back in patterns I thought I had healed.
4. The monster of original wounds.
I still don’t fully know what to say about this one. But I know it lives deep. It’s the echo of not being enough, of having to be perfect to be deserving, of having to sustain and fix in order to be seen.
The imprint of the failure of people who were supposed to teach how to become, how to feel safe — and couldn’t… sometimes because they themselves didn’t know how, and were also failed while growing up.
Even my hesitation to write about it is part of how powerful this one is.
5. The monster of needing to fix what he broke.
The guilt of wanting him even after he betrayed me. Of missing him after the lies. Of craving his voice after he blocked me.This one made me question if I had lost all self-respect, but I hadn’t. I just wanted to matter to the person who was undoing me.
6. The monster of nervous system collapse.
It wasn’t just emotional, it was physical. My body stopped feeling safe. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was on high alert all the time. It wasn’t love. It was survival. And I didn’t realize the difference until I was already drowning.
7. The monster of magical thinking.
I believed in the man he could be, more than he ever believed in himself. And I let that fantasy keep me in reality that was slowly breaking me down.
8. The monster of silenced anger.
All the things I didn’t say. All the times I let him off the hook. All the rage I swallowed because I didn’t want to be seen as too emotional, too demanding, too much. This monster taught me that anger isn’t the problem, self-abandonment is.
9. The monster of reality collapse.
When lies come slowly and consistently, you stop trusting your own mind. I started second-guessing myself. Wondering if I was imagining things. The scariest part wasn’t that he lied, it’s that I stopped believing myself.
Rebuilding that has been one of the hardest parts of healing.
Mirrors are really everywhere and in everyone.. once we start attention to them and put an effort in understanding we can see them..
I kept wondering if maybe… just maybe… my absence would finally be enough. Maybe it would be the mirror that breaks. Maybe then, the monsters would come. Maybe that would be the moment he’d finally stop running from himself.
S..
